Date: Tue, 05 Nov 1996 20:59:06 GMT
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Last-modified: Mon, 19 Aug 1996 19:36:02 GMT
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<title>Paradyn Project Overview</title>
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<!WA0><!WA0><!WA0><!WA0><!WA0><IMG SRC="http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~paradyn/paradyn.small.gif" ALT="Paradyn Logo" ALIGN=MIDDLE>
    Paradyn Project Overview Page</H1>
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<H2>Overview</H1>

The Paradyn Parallel Program Performance Tools project is exploring new
approaches to building scalable tools for parallel program performance.
<P>
Traditional performance tools for sequential machines fail to scale to
large parallel systems.  Normal post-mortem-style tools typically
collect information about all events that occur during execution; this
can produce trace data at a rate of several Gigabytes per second on a
machine with thousands of nodes, a rate which is impossible for a
performance tool to cope with.  The standard solution to this problem
is to collect only a small subset of available performance data.
However, choosing the right set of metrics is difficult or impossible
to know a priori, and places a large decision-making burden on the
programmer.
<P>
Paradyn takes a new approach, called <em>dynamic instrumentation</em>, 
that is based
on dynamically controlling what performance data is to be collected.
Dynamic instrumentation allows data collection instructions to be inserted
into an application program during runtime. Paradyn
is able to look for a variety of performance problems during
a single execution, while not being overwhelmed with all the available
data at any one time.  In addition, dynamic instrumentation that has
not be inserted incurs no overhead, in contrast to instrumentation
that is staticly-inserted but currently disabled.
<P>
Paradyn provides <em>decision support</em> for the tool user.  Paradyn
assists the user in deciding which bottlenecks to look for; in fact,
Paradyn can search automatically to isolate performance bottlenecks,
and then explain them to the user using descriptions or
visualizations.
<p>
Paradyn incorporates a new approach for describing performance
information to users of high-level parallel languages; Paradyn maps
performance data between multiple layers of abstraction, and user can
choose to look at it in terms of high-level language constructs or
low-level machine structures.
<p>
Since Fall 1994, we have been collaborating with the
<!WA1><!WA1><!WA1><!WA1><!WA1><a href="http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~wwt/">Wisconsin
Wind Tunnel Project</a>
to support Paradyn on their Blizzard platform
(both CM-5 and Cluster of Workstation versions).
<p>
A recent <!WA2><!WA2><!WA2><!WA2><!WA2><a href="http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~wwt/wi_week16nov94.html"><i>Wisconsin Week</i> article</a>
summarizes our current ARPA funding and has commentary from Profs. Bart Miller
and Mark Hill.
<p>
Paradyn Release 1.1 is available for SunOS, Solaris, AIX, SP2, HP-UX, and
PVM.
<p>
<hr>
Last modified:
Mon Aug 19 14:35:57 CDT 1996
by
<!WA3><!WA3><!WA3><!WA3><!WA3><a href="http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~bart">bart</a></b>
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